With Firewatch, Olly Moss Brings His Subversive Touch to Video Games

The landscapes that Olly Moss designed for Firewatch are vibrant and elegiac.

Illustration by Campo Santo

In the past six years, Olly Moss, a twenty-nine-year-old self-taught graphic designer and illustrator from Hampshire, in the south of England, has become known for his stylish reinterpretations of classic film posters. He has a better hit rate than Hollywood’s artists, delivering iconic imagery in reliable (and, lately, highly collectible) servings, and perhaps as a result, his aesthetic—narrowly defined palettes, gracile typography, striking composition—has grown familiar enough to parody. Now, for the first time, Moss has brought his eye to interactive entertainment, with a video game called Firewatch, which débuted on Tuesday. “I’m nervous about the launch,” he told me, earlier this week. “I think we made a good thing, but I think we also made a strange thing.”

Firewatch is certainly singular. The game is set in a few acres of a fictional national park in Wyoming, where you play as a fire lookout who intends to spend the lingering days of summer working alone at his typewriter, occasionally scanning the horizon for curls of smoke. The emptiness and solitude is apropos: Henry, the game’s protagonist, is here to heal a heart that’s broken in complicated ways. He is married to a person at once present and departed—a wife afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s, who now lives with her family in Australia. The game’s opening, which establishes the premise with snippets of dialogue, charting the decline of mind and marriage, is both tender and devastating. By the time you reach the wilderness, you share Henry’s guilt and his eagerness to escape.

The core of the game is the relationship between Henry (voiced by Rich Sommer, better known as Harry Crane, from “Mad Men”) and Delilah (Cissy Jones), a neighboring lookout with whom Henry keeps in near constant contact on his battery-powered radio. Delilah, who has spent many summers here, is by turns a mentor, a therapist, and a flirt. You choose how Henry responds to her jibes and inquiries, selecting from a range of options to reply either in kind, in defense, or with silence. The characters’ exchanges are complex and nuanced right from the get-go. This study in rudderless forty-somethings is focussed and sharpened by an unfolding mystery in the forest, which mixes the mundane (the vandalism of beer- and vendetta-fuelled teen-agers) with campfire horror (abandoned caves, nefarious eavesdroppers, strangers glimpsed in silhouette). The tension is further wound by the ever-present threat of fire.

A frame from the video game Firewatch, designed by Olly Moss.

Illustration by Campo Santo

The qualities of Moss’s graphic design are evident not only in the props in Henry’s lookout tower—the informational posters about regional flora, the illustrated warnings to hikers never to discard a stubbed match—but also in the landscapes themselves, which are both vibrant and elegiac. There are the baby blues of the fir-bordered lake in which Henry finds a gaggle of skinny-dipping, foul-mouthed teen-age girls. There are the rangy trunks of the trees in Aspen Wood, spliced by beams of a rusty sun. There are few landmarks by which to find one’s bearings, but a clear map soon accumulates in the mind.

Moss was responsible for the game’s lighting and color scheme, and he also worked on the layout of the environment itself, alongside the artist Jane Ng*—a task that Moss likens to landscape gardening. “It’s easy to frame a shot for a photo or illustration, but it’s far harder to create a space where the player is going to naturally frame the shot well themselves,” he said. “Then you have to keep it feeling like a wild natural place and not somewhere that has been meticulously designed.” In this regard, the game is a triumph; practically any frame could be turned into a postcard. In fact, as soon as Henry finds a virtual disposable camera, early in the game, you are encouraged to do just this. (Although there is no mention of the fact up front, players in some countries can order prints of their photos when the story is complete.)

While the drama takes place in the dialogue itself, it’s agitated by travel; Delilah sends Henry off to investigate all manner of disturbances, and the things that he finds often jostle the plot. For Moss, who previously only had to consider the aesthetic effect of his work, the added demand of practicality, in shepherding players to the correct scene, has offered a welcome, if disorienting, challenge. “If we found that players weren’t finding where they were supposed to go next, we’d stick a bunch of red flowers around openings in the bushes to draw their attention, for example,” he said. “It’s finding the balance, though. If you make the path too explicit, that can be irritating to players who want to find their own way.” Ladders, rocks, and fallen tree trunks are lined with white paint in the game, a subtle indication that they can be climbed or traversed. “Nothing compromises your vision more than someone getting lost and bored in your game,” Moss told me. “The objective is not to make a pretty game. It’s to make a game world that supports the story the game is trying to tell.”

Moss’s work has always had a close relationship with video games. One of his earliest projects repackaged old games in the house style of the Penguin Classics. This resulted in two commissions for posters, first for the final season of “Lost” and, later, for the Marvel film “Thor.” Although modern video games, especially blockbusters, are sometimes ridiculed for offering an identikit palette of military browns and grays, Moss is defensive of game artists. “There are plenty of beautiful video games out there, many that are influencing graphic design outside of games,” he said. He cited Monument Valley, a handsome iPhone game, released in 2014, that plays with M. C. Escher-esque tricks of perspective, as an example of a game that has been hugely influential in terms of color, shape, geometric pattern, and typography in the broader sphere of graphic design. “Any homogeneity comes from the unwillingness of large studios to take risks and push something a bit strange through the focus groups,” he said.

Homogeneity eventually becomes anonymity, but games like Firewatch will surely drive larger studios to take greater design risks, bringing further diversity to the medium. Moss, who studied English literature at Birmingham University, a course that he paid for by selling T-shirt designs on Threadless, hopes to continue working in video games. “For the longest time I wanted to be in advertising,” he said. “I’m so thankful it didn’t work out.”

*Clarification: an earlier version of this article omitted mention of Jane Ng, Moss’s co-developer.